Fox asset, ferret cannon and egotistical giraffe

I would heartily recommend watching this video of a lecture at MIT by Bruce Schneier entitled “NSA Surveillance and What To Do About It” which covers the NSA, code names, security, the future of the web amongst other things and lots more. Fascinating and rewardingly nerdy from start to finish. In particular this quote about how the NSA’s remit changed from the Cold War era to the post 9/11 era of preventing it ever happening again.

…that’s when the intelligence agencies got an impossible mission. Never again. Make sure this never happens again. If you think about it, if you’re given the goal of making sure something never happens. The only way you can possibly achieve that is to know everything that does happen.